


The Education of Tristan Duffy

by Missy



Category: American Horror Story: Hotel
Genre: Afterlife, F/M, Ghosts, Reading, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 02:46:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8428465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: Tristan vows to become the sort of man Liz needs.  That's going to take a lot of reading, but he's dead, and therefore has all the time in the world.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wayfarers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wayfarers/gifts).



Two weeks into his eternal confinement and Tristan Duffy is the one thing he thought he’d never be in his strange extended eternal life: bored out of his wits. 

There are ways to remedy that in a place like the Cortez. Some ghosts chose murder to break up the monotony. The quieter ones settled for shifting around objects and causing things to go missing. The Countess’ watch. A sandwich from room service.

Liz’s books. 

Tristan eyes those with curiosity as he makes the slow hover from one end of the hotel to the other. He’d wrested the missing tome from Sally after a brief fight and chooses to take it to the front desk while Liz is out with her investors at a business meeting. _She’s probably re-writing their contracts right in front of them,_ he smiles to himself as he returns the copy of Proust’s letters to its rightful place. 

Education. That was what he thinks of when he thinks of Liz.

Liz had often read to him during their brief relationship, and had often encouraged the improvement of Tristan’s mind – a mind that Tristan wasn’t entirely sure he’d possessed at the time but one Liz taught him to cultivate. As the Cortez slowly shape-shifts around him due to Liz’ hard work, Tristan finally comes to a momentous decision.

He will use his eternity in the smartest way possible; in the only one available to him. He’ll read. He’ll research. He’ll make himself the sort of man Liz would want to live with for a thousand years.

He’ll make himself worthy of her.

 

*** 

 

The classics are a fairly simple place to start. Sally lets him borrow her phone and he uses it to buy books and have them ferried up the back staircase. He starts with soapy novels and works his way toward the dryer climbs of Dostoyevsky and Bellows. Philosophy makes his head ache, but he dives into it, sentence by sentence, bit by bit, climbing paragraphs like a Sherpa on the rocky side of a cliff. Years fly by and his knowledge of the world expands – along with his collection. Thankfully March doesn’t care if he commandeers one of his many false closets to store his growing number of books.

The next time Tristan looks up, he hears Liz talking about her illness, about her plans for the future. He’s tried to let her have her own life, not to eavesdrop, but those words - they pause him still right in the middle of his Chaucer.

He isn’t ready, but time never lets you choose when big moments will happen. He knows that now.

 

**** 

 

They’re tangled up in the privacy of a spare room, fully reunited in every way possible. The question pokes at him, and these are his first post-coital words. “You’re not mad that I didn’t come to you, are you?” 

Liz’s face is tucked into the curve of his neck. “Disappointed? Annoyed? Perhaps. But mad…no, not mad. I have you again, after all.”

Tristan kisses the top of her head and she sighs, contented, playing with his chest hair. A mischievous idea. “Let me show you my surprise,” he says, pulling away from her and handing Liz her slip while he dons his pants. She rolls her eyes at his uncharacteristic formality but dresses anyway.

“If it’s a pile of finger bones or the skeleton of that bellhop that went missing ten years ago, I’d rather skip it.”

“It’s not like that,” Tristan says. He takes Liz’ hand and they make the journey together to his book closet – four flights up, last room on the right. 

A family sits on the bed, having room service and watching cartoons. The sound of their joyful piping makes Liz smile. “We never could have had this back then,” she says, as Tristan tries to sneak the door open without them noticing. 

“And I think you deserve a reward for it,” he says. Tristan has managed to pry it open, and he nudges Liz into the room and switches the light on quickly.

“….You’re rewarding me with a closet assignation?” she asks.

“No,” he laughs. Tapping against the false side of the wall, he pushes through the door, tugging her behind him into the library and shutting it closed.

And her eyes are as wide as a moonlit pool, as wide as a shining sea, when the volumes finally come to light. 

“Surprise,” he says, pecking her cheek. “This time, I’m going to read them to you.”

And her kiss is the only reward he really needs.


End file.
